For as much as I hate the vitriol between me and my family it happened again.  I feel this is something that is important to post on for posterity, and to highlight the battles I face with family.  A little pretext for the first message, shall we?  I called my father for “Father’s Day“, and it was the first conversation in nearly 3 years.  The conversation started out well, and it went downhill pretty fast.  He immediately went into misgendering me, and shaming me.  Making insinuations about what I “needed to be for my family”, and made the fallacies of morality about transsexuality, which quite frankly don’t exist.  He essentially shoved his beliefs down my throat, again.  He also made a point of telling me how I’d never get pregnant, and tried to guilt me for not giving my mother a grandchild.
Ever line dripped with, “It’s about me”.  In essence, that me being what I am deprives him of something essential that all parents are ‘almost’ owed from their children, which makes me the ‘bad guy’.  I just wanted to let him know I loved him, and recognize him on Father’s Day, and he used it to attack me.  He used it to belittle, dehumanize and degender me.  He is an asshole, and I love him.  But I hate everything about his bigoted, ignorant beliefs.  I really hoped he’d grown out of this, but after 3 years he is still in denial.  I don’t know if it’ll ever leave, and I guess I don’t have the time or patience to wait for it to happen.  Moreover, I feel like… No, I know I deserve better than this sort of treatment, especially from him.
I am beyond sick of the tropes, and bullshit from them.  I guess perhaps I am a masochist because I go through this with him over and over, and over again.  I just want him to see, because regardless of how I feel about him, he is my family.  I try my damnedest to get that across to him.  Moreover, he said this…  “All I remember is a happy boy”.  HA!  Is that a joke?  Happy.  Do you call drawing pictures of your penis falling off happy?  Do you call praying every-night for someone, anyone to come and “FIX YOUR GENDER” happy?  Do you call thinking about death all the time so that by the time you are 9 you know 115 ways to die, and which you’d prefer?  Do you call crying you eyes out many nights asking God, “WHY AM I A BOY WHEN I SHOULD BE A GIRL?”  I don’t know about you, but I think this shows that I was fucking miserable, and it was that line of thought that brought about the trail of vitriol you are about to witness following my first message.  Keep in mind, the only reason I even tried again was because I thought maybe my dad was ready, but he isn’t.
(WARNING:  The messages contain things that may be triggering and extremely emotional to some readers, specifically transgender/transsexual readers.  I say that because it was emotionally upsetting to me, so it should be emotionally upsetting to a lot of people.)
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Reneta Scian:
It was good to talk to you for a bit the other day.  I was a bit emotional about the news concerning Nanny (step grandmother), and I send my wishes.  I am hoping work is going well still.  I am happy that you got a good job, especially in such hard economic times.  But it is what it is.  I do my best to take what life throws at me, as do you.  In either case I am wishing I could do more in the case of things with Nanny, but I know I can’t.  I just want you to know that I love you, and my thoughts will be with you in going through this tough time.  I will keep the lines of communication open with you.  That is all I can do, and the same for you as well.
Something that need be mentioned though… It’s not to be contradicting but you said something to me that kind of reminded me of things.  Especially of what things were like for me during the time applied by your statement “I remember a happy boy”.  It may be difficult to except, but the honest truth was is that being what I am was miserable, even before you met me.  I spent a lot of time thinking about death when I was young, but just kind of got by how I could.  I dealt with it in whatever way was available to me, and in a way to protect myself.  I learned to deal with things by outwardly concealing them, and then later venting those things in my safe and protected spaces.  It’s why I was such an escapist, why I receded into my own little world so much.  It’s a common self defense mechanism against trauma (Psychology 101 stuff), and gender dysphoria is traumatic.  It wasn’t just that I had issue with my gender, but that I lived in a “gender conforming” world which coerces conformity.
I didn’t feel I could be myself, and I hated it.  I didn’t feel I could tell anyone, and I had good reason to feel fearful about people knowing it. I did express it, though most people didn’t know how to cope with it, much less understand it.  It wasn’t uncommon for me to lay awake at night, crying and wishing for God to fix me, or for some sort of “rescuer” that would make it all better.  My friends from high school remembered how much I harped on the fact that I hated being a ‘man’.  It was never something that was right for me, and I did everything to avoid it (even enlisting).  But I never, or not until it came to a head, realized I could do anything about it.  I lived in a self sustaining internal prison, trapped within my own condition.  It’s no different than any other medical condition, it exists and it requires treatment.  I think this is all something that will be important for you to know in a dialog between you and I.
As for religion and morality there isn’t anything about people like me in most religions, including Christianity.  Eunuch is the closest thing that matches, and there is very little on that topic.  One thing I did come to understand from the Bible in this essence was this… That it is better for me to be who I am now than to end my life in suicide.  Just like any life saving bodily alteration, this is no different though the cause and source of why is different.  Mathew 5:29  (not verbatim)  I am very well aware of morality, and I am quite versed on the bible (though I am not a scholar).  I did in search of that once find that being transsexual isn’t a sin, especially not when it is necessary to prevent something worse.  I know not every one would agree, but as a part of my agnostic stance on things it seems plausible.
I share these things and others with you because I feel you deserve to know me, to know the person who does suffer from this condition, not the one who suffered in silence all those years.  I want you to know me as a happy person, who is so inside as well.  I feel in time that perspective could be transformative.  I know that given your world view, and what you grew up knowing that this can be hard to grasp as being outside of your sphere of knowledge and experience.  However, it is my reality.  I didn’t base my decision on any one inclusive reason, I based life on a body of overwhelming knowledge, even now more affirmed to me than before.  What I once denied, I do so no longer.  It couldn’t be change it if it were attempted, as was once done.  I espouse it to be so because it permeates from every fiber in my being.  The way things appeared to others was more about my character and my nature than about my true condition.
Well, you and mom take care, and I’ll talk later.
With love,

Rene

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Dad:

i am sorry for what I am about to say. I raised you correctly. Until you get over your self and realize that you are not the most important person in this world, please don’t contact me again. My mother is the most important person in the world to me and so your should be to you. You are so hung up on yourself. I personnally think that you are very sick and in need of help. The people that put you on this path are in need of help more so than you. Your are a train wreck waiting to happen. The hole is getting deeper. Your are just digging away while others around you wait patiently for David to become another mark in there porfolio. They won’t be there when you fall. Don’t let the hole get to much deeper. Your close to being unsaveable.

 

Don’t you think that this little game of words has gone on long enough. I do. I want names, phone numbers, addresses of all the so called professional idiots that have sent you down this road of distruction. I want to meet these people and find out what kind of idiots you are in bed with. Provide this info so I can get involved nad clean you up.
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Reneta Scian:
I will not expose my therapist, nor any professional to your bigotry.  You were always good at denying reality when it was inconvenient to you.  Pretending the train isn’t there isn’t going to spare you a gruesome fate when it arrives.  You position is a contradiction to reality.  You are wrong.  It’s not because I say your wrong, but because the massive bodies of evidence that support what I have told you all along.  I will not put myself into a position where I could cause harm to myself because you value my genitals more than me as a person.  Also, its not my responsibility to “make you grandchildren”.  What I do with my body is my business.  My genitals, my body, not yours which means your opinion on them is invalid to me.  My life, and my needs aren’t up to you.  You are stubbornly and ignorantly stuck in your own little world which quite frankly differs from reality.
I don’t need your approval to be who I am.  My life will go on, and quite happily in my reformed body mind you, without you.  I just wanted to show that I loved you, but all you wanted to do was shove your beliefs down my throat and devalue my person on the basis that I am not reproductively viable, or viable as my target gender, and that I will never experience life as a cisgender woman who is able to have children.  Your position also devalues the persons of older women, intersexed women, and women who are sterile.  The sole purpose life is not procreation.  It is a faculty of the preservation of the race, but it is on each persons autonomy to opt in, or opt out of that scheme.  Essentially, my body, my rules got it?  You’re ignorant, arrogant, and bigoted and I shall abide in you no longer, or until a time where you do something about that.  But, I will not hold my breath.
Honestly, I just share so that you may one day understand.  But if you want to piss on me, then I’ll slam that door in your face.
The only person playing a “game of words” is you.  Your pride will be your downfall.  Being trans isn’t easy, sometimes it’s a damned nightmare.  But it is who I am, and it makes everything else in my life bearable.  More than that, it conforms to who I am.  NO one convinced me of this, I wanted it before I asked for permission.  I needed it because that life I once had nearly killed me.  But my word isn’t good enough for you, my testimony is your tissue paper.  You don’t like it when I say I, because in your eyes, I am not a valid person.  You dehumanize me, you make me less of a person in your eyes.  I am sorry though, but you don’t make me.  No, you didn’t “raise me right”, you punished me excessively, you didn’t express love or affection.
You tried to conform my “variance” in your socially stereotypical ideal of masculinity, and used me as a scapegoat for your anger.  You made gender dysphoria so much more painful for me than it had to be.  You didn’t raise me, you tormented me, and I just happened to be resilient enough to not crumble under your thumb.  You have no idea, and you will choose to remain steadfast in your ignorance.  You are deluded.  I just wanted to be accepted, to have a family.  I just wanted to show the ones who raised me that I loved them, and that I wanted to try for them.  I’ll always have my door open to you, assuming you can find a way through your bigotry.  No one knows when.  You aren’t man enough to admit your wrong, and you aren’t man enough to challenge yourself to find understanding.  You don’t got what it takes to be an integral part of my life.  3 years, and you are stuck on page one still.
Make all the excuses you want, conjure all the reasons you want to justify why what you are doing is okay, but in the end you are still wrong.  What you are showing me isn’t love, it’s manipulation, and Control Freak 101 kinda shit.  But it’s my life, and you do not control it.  For the first time in my life, I have ownership of my own body and my own person, which means you can’t control it.  The breakdown in this relationship is your failure, not mine.  I am a woman, I have always been a woman, and just because I played a man once doesn’t make me one.  But that is too far beyond your capacity for comprehension.  Even if you didn’t believe in all the science and facts behind it, then why isn’t my word good enough for you?  Why isn’t the position of the institutions that talk about my care enough for you?  Problem is that in your beliefs nothing is enough.  You’ll never get it and I can’t wait around on bated breath for you to do so.
Rene
PS Because I am not (Old name), and it’s rude and disrespectful to call me whatever you feel like calling me.  You don’t define me, I do.

I really wish I knew a better way for this sort of stuff, but I don’t.  I can’t help but fight this bullcrap.  What else can I do aside just avoid them altogether.  But that will never help him overcome.  Perhaps cutting them both off altogether will do the trick.  I don’t know.  I just don’t see this moving or changing at all.  I hate these conversations…  But I do it because it is against my principles to let people push me around with their nonsense and bigotry without pushing back.  And I share that because I think it’s essential for others to understand my struggle.  I wish all the best to my readers, and I apologize for any emotional disturbance this blog may have caused you in reading.  It makes me a little sad thinking about how stupid it is that he has refused to grow and change out of this.

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